XCOM 2 mod lets your soldiers get all close and personal

I’ve a confession to make: after enjoying my first play through of XCOM 2, technical issues forced me away from it. I’ve got a fairly high-end PC, but I couldn’t deal with the performance hits.

There’s been a bunch of fun mods out there though, and this one seems particularly interesting: it brings Fire Emblem style relationships to XCOM’s tactical battlefields, bringing in the ability to get buffs if your squad are good are good at working together and gives soldiers relationships, giving them a chance to get ‘Shaken’ if a soldier they’re close to dies.

It’s not a minor risk either, there’s quite a risk that if your soldiers are close they’ll lose it a bit when their friends buy the farm. From the notes for the mod:
“Each soldier in a high cohesion relationship with the dead soldier will have a 70% chance of getting Shaken if a soldier ends up dying in the mission. “

Helping your buddies out gives the squad more cohesion points, so hauling an unconscious squad-mate to the extraction gives the two of you a strong bond, accidentally shooting them is perhaps not so great.

You also have a total squad cohesion rating, giving you some big buffs for cohesive squads.

This is the top end bonuses, but they scale up healthily from just 300 points. The top level buffs will probably have massive consequences when you break them out in combat, and it seems like an exciting way to add another layer to XCOM2’s mass of strategy.